NFL Ops: History Of The Official

[HLin NC]

The NFL Ops page has some good stuff but it isn't publicized much.

History of the Official | NFL Football Operations

[Robert Goodman]

Thanks. I'd like to know how McNally's committee "graded each foul call on a seven-point scale, from poor (1) to excellent (7)." Seems an individual call is either right or wrong, period. The writer probably misleads the same as in the next sentence: "McNally then looked for any plays in which a foul should have been called but no whistle was blown."

I hadn't realized Hugh Ray worked on both NFSHSAA's & NFL's rules, but I'm not surprised. It was later that NFL's book became crappy by accretion.

[jTheUmp]

The 7-point scale, as far as I'm aware, is still used today.

Vastly simplified (and probably somewhat inaccurately), it breaks down like this:
1 is the worst score, 7 is the highest score.

Every play starts as a 4, and is upgraded/downgraded from there.
1s are things like egregious timing errors (see the game from earlier this season where about 15 seconds ran off the clock inadvertently and nobody noticed), phantom calls, blatantly incorrect no-calls, incorrect penalty enforcements, etc.

2s and 3s are for more minor "misses"... a holding foul that wasn't 'big enough', etc. A lot of the "by the book, that's a foul, but we'd prefer it not to be called" type situations probably fit in the 3s.

4s are the default "nothing happened, good or bad" play.

5s and 6s are for the unusually good work by a particular official or crew.

7s are the major crew savers: catching the "big fish" that nobody else saw, handling some unusual situation, etc. As I understand it, there might be about a dozen 7s handed out league-wide over the course of an entire season.